Interaction Menu: Features and Ideas

Hello! How are you doing?

Alex here today to share some more development progress. I am currently working on the interaction menu for Paralives. This menu is what shows up when you click on an object or on another character in live mode. It displays all the actions that your Para can perform. Let me walk you through what we have in mind for this menu! This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it. 🔐

A concept illustration of our old interaction menu, as seen in some of our past videos.

Core Features

We already had a basic version of that menu but there are a lot of important features that we now need to add to it. Here are a few of them:

• Show the monetary cost of performing the interaction, if it has one.
  ➡ It’s important that you know how much an interaction is going to cost you, when buying food or doing any interactions that will charge you money.
• Gray out an interaction if it can not be performed at the moment.
  ➡ You can’t watch television if there’s no power and the players need to be able to understand that easily.
• Have subfolders of interactions if there are too many of them.
  ➡ There will be a LOT of interactions possible on a computer object for instance or when socializing with someone so they need to be neatly organized in subfolders.
• Highlight special interactions that are exceptionally available at a given time.
  ➡ Some interactions will only be available because of the current mood of your Para, their skill level, their career, their personality or because of their relationship level. It’s important that the players know why these special interactions appear in the menu when they do.
• Have icons for some interactions.
  ➡ Sometimes, an icon can help players recognize and understand what an interaction does.

Interaction Menu Layout: Radial or Vertical List?

Consider the following menu layouts.

Left: a radial menu as seen in the game Overwatch. This radial (also called pie or wheel) layout is often used in life simulation games. Right: a vertical list menu that is very common in softwares and operating systems like Windows.

❓ What would be the most interesting option for Paralives?

Radial menu

• 👍 Fast and easy to use when playing with a gamepad because you just have to point the joystick in a direction and press the confirm button. However, controller support is not confirmed for Paralives at the moment.
• ❌ Becomes crowded more easily when there are a lot of items.

Vertical list menu

• 👍 Unlike the radial menu, when opening a subfolder of items, the previous list is still visible so it’s very easy to go back to a previous item. (see right screenshot in the above image).
• 👍 The hierarchy is easier to understand. We can place the most frequent or important interactions at the top and the eye will read them first. In the case of the radial menu, we don’t know if the players are going to look at the left, right, top or bottom items first so we wouldn’t know where to place the most important interactions.

Conclusion: We are currently planning to go with a vertical list menu. This way, it will be easier to navigate the interactions on objects that have a lot of them and have subfolders of them. In the future, if we add controller support to Paralives, we could add an optional radial menu since it works very well when playing with a gamepad.

Extra Ideas and Innovations Being Considered

The following list consists of interaction menu related ideas that we are looking into and that might or might not make it into the game. Some of them are not high priority and could also be added later, after the release.

1. Integration with needs: When hovering an interaction with your mouse, it would be great to show how much of your hygiene need it would fill, for instance. Washing your hands might fill it up a little while taking a shower might fill it up completely. Also, when clicking on the hygiene need in the interface, it would be great to show possible interactions related to hygiene. This way, you wouldn’t always have to move the camera in your house to find the shower which can be useful if your home is big or has multiple floors.

Hovering an interaction that will fill out one of your Para’s needs would preview the exact amount that the need would be at after completing the interaction.

2. Clean organization for social interactions: We might end up with having a hundred interactions available when clicking on another Para that you want to interact with so the interaction menu would become very bloated. Organizing these interactions in subfolders will help but we have to be smart to find the best way possible. If you have to select the “Friendly”, “Romantic” or “Mean” folder each time you open the menu, it can be repetitive, especially if you use the menu a lot in a short period of time and only ever go into the “Friendly” folder because you are currently speaking with a friend. One way to help with that could be to have tabs for the conversation's mood above the interaction menu or have a button to select the current mood of the conversation.

In this example, the friendly mood tab is selected so only friendly interactions are shown. The game would remember your current selection so you wouldn’t have to select the friendly mood tab again each time that you open the menu.

3. General socialization interactions: One thing that could be difficult with the interaction menu is to have to open it multiple times in a row to select multiple social interactions, if you want to interact with another Para for a long time. Having a general “Socialize” interaction could help with that because the characters would speak together continuously instead of only for a few minutes to perform a very specific action. You would then be free to select more precise interactions or to simply let the characters socialize by themselves (they wouldn’t do anything crazy during this conversation unless you order them to).

4. Favorite interaction and shortcuts: In simulation games, I often end up doing the same interactions with many objects. It would be nice to be able to label an interaction as favorite so it always appears on top in the interaction menu. Also, this labelled interaction could be activated by shift-clicking or right-clicking an object without even having to open the interaction menu. Frequent interactions like sending a Para to bed every night or ordering them to use the toilet would become even more easier for players who want to use these shortcuts.

The interaction labelled as favorite would appear on the top of the list for easy and quick access.

5. A search option: Sometimes, players will know an interaction by its name but are not sure in which subfolder it is so searching by name could be helpful in those cases.

6. Display interactions in the build mode catalog: When browsing objects to purchase while building your house, it could sometimes be useful to know which interactions are possible on an object before purchasing and placing it. The furniture catalog could give players a preview of the interactions available on a given object.

7. Twitch integration: On streaming platforms such as Twitch, viewers could vote in real time for the interaction they want their favorite streamers to choose. This interactivity could lead to a fun situation when watching someone play Paralives live on a stream. Keep in mind that if we ever do a feature like this, it would probably be later, after the release of the game since it’s not high on our priority list.

The Twitch integration for the dialogue option voting system in the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

That’s it for now. There are even more ideas that we are studying for the interaction menu but I hope that was an interesting read today. I’d like to thank the Patrons from the Paralives Discord server who shared ideas for the interaction menu in the #patrons channel last week! Don’t hesitate to share more feedback and ideas in the comment section of this post and I’ll be very happy to read them. 💌

Have a great day and take care,

Alex